[Lnc-business] EMAIL BALLOT 200513-1 MOTION TO RESCIND MAY 9 MOTION DESCRIBED BELOW

[Alicia Mattson]

Our platform demands that the constitution not be suspended in times of
war, and the Platform Committee is proposing to add other conditions to
that.  The LNC is currently voting on a motion to say that emergencies are
not a legitimate reason to violate rights.  How can the LNC, then,
facilitate what is clearly going to be a bulldozing of delegate rights with
this online convention plan?

There were many delegates who were unable to attend tonight's online event,
so I need to share some information that was given.

First recall that Zoom has a meeting mode, and it has a webinar mode.  In
meeting mode, participants can see who else is present, can see whose hands
are raised, and NORMALLY have mic/video rights, as it is designed for a
more deliberative process.  In webinar mode, it's designed to be one-way
information, presenter gives info and the rest are passive observers, and
it is not designed for a deliberative process for group decisions.  We
can't tell who else is or is not present.  We can't see whose hands are
raised or whether the chair is recognizing people in the order in which
hands were raised.  We are locked in isolation cages and can only speak
when someone else gives us permission.

Tonight it was explained that in meeting mode, Zoom has an absolute maximum
capacity of 1000 participants.  We have 1046 delegates, so the platform
which has been chosen is not capable of hosting all of our delegates.  This
is a serious matter when we're talking about duly elected delegates being
prevented from attending the meeting because they're one of the last 46 to
arrive.

The chair indicated we would use meeting mode for the Friday night
credentialing and agenda process, but then when it came time for elections,
he would put us into webinar mode because it can handle up to 3000
participants.

Remember webinar mode from the first test run?  Remember all my comments
about how that violates the fundamental requirements for simultaneous aural
communication among all participants, noted on page ONE of RONR?  I thought
we were past that possibility when the second test run was put into meeting
mode, and we were allowed to control our own mics.

Webinar mode means you have no means of raising a point of order or other
privileged motion in a timely manner.  This is also a very serious
fundamental rights issue.  If our rules are violated, and we can't
immediately act to alert the assembly to the problem and have it corrected,
it's a huge problem.  Some mistake made impacting a candidate's status?
Election results are incorrect?  Delegates who are for some reason unable
to enter the meeting to exercise their rights to vote?  Can't open your mic
to say anything.

For tonight's trial we were actually in meeting mode, but the account
admins had chosen to take away our microphone controls even in meeting
mode!!

Under these conditions, delegate rights are subject to the whims of a chair
who has, more and more lately, demonstrated that he doesn't give a flip
about the rights of members to speak in meetings.  I am not going to
surrender my rights as a member to such a chair.

Tonight we practiced with debate over the silly subject of whether hot dogs
are sandwiches.  How did that go?  The motions and debate were funny,
however there were numerous procedural violations.  The Chair refused to
designate any particular means by which a delegate could raise a point of
order.  He sorta suggested maybe we could flash icons or something but then
refused to pay attention to such signals.

There were various causes for points of order:  debate not germane to the
motion, the motions being misstated as completely different things than
were moved, the polls being put up for voting also containing the wrong
motion, too many amendments pending at a time, etc.  These are all things
that need someone to say something immediately, but we couldn't.

We were left trying all sorts of novel things to get attention:  flash
various icons repeatedly, physically wave our hands on our video, hold up
notes to our cameras.  Nothing worked.  All we could do was raise our hands
to get in line to speak with non-privileged priority...which took 20
minutes.  Oh, and if in the meantime we tried flashing
yes/no/coffee/fast/slow icons, Zoom put our hand down and took us out of
the waiting line to speak.  At one point when I had a hand up for a point
of order, a faceless admin pulled me out of the main hall and put me into
the credentialing room, which also lost my place in the speaking queue.

When several people eventually got to speak after waiting forever to raise
points of order the chair was very dismissive about the inability to
exercise our rights to raise privileged motions.  He clearly didn't care
and wasn't going to see that any mechanism was implemented.  Instead we
were treated to the chair whining that:
-privileged motions annoy him
-privileged motions are "a giant pain in the ass"
-he doesn't know a right way to get a privileged motion to bubble up
-it's tricky, and I don't have an answer
-and maybe if someone put up the coffee cup icon he could somehow send the
parliamentarian to "deal with the individual."

It was callous disregard for delegate rights to call attention to
potentially serious problems, and it was clear he doesn't WANT to allow us
to do that.

I'm also going to say it out loud that by the end of it, the chair was
drunk and slurring words.

Is this how this board is going to allow the selection of our Presidential
and Vice-Presidential nominees to proceed?  With a chair hostile to
delegate rights just gaveling through?  We owe better to our members.

All of this is on top of the MANY, MANY complaints we are getting about
delegates not having received the notices/links, not being able to enter
the room, etc.  All the other execution problems are also serious, but to
me are secondary to the reality that the chair intends to bulldoze all of
us.

The chair keeps saying that we will try to follow our existing rules as
closely as possible.  In this meeting, he declared that election voting
will just be each delegation figuring out for themselves how to vote, and
they can do it any way they want, and then these 51 sets of results get
submitted.  (By the way, the Secretary has been told that these votes will
first go through staff and not even be submitted directly to her...there
should NOT be a middle-man!!)  In the meeting I pointed out that our
Convention Rule 10 requires these delegation votes to be by written ballot,
and the individual ballots submitted for tellers to double-check the
tallies.  I asked how this plan is compliant with our rules.  I explained
the reason this rule exists is that we have discovered MANY, MANY errors in
delegation tallies, and we need double-checking to minimize the chances of
announcing incorrect election results.  The chair was dismissive, oh well,
we'll do our best...

It is important that delegate votes be counted properly, and these are not
issues that we can afford to take lightly.

I'm not unsympathetic to the couple of states with early deadlines, but we
just need to use lawyers and fight for judicial relief in those states.
Why is that not already being done anyway?

-Alicia









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On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 9:36 PM Caryn Ann Harlos via Lnc-business <
lnc-business at hq.lp.org> wrote:

> We have an electronic mail ballot.
>
> Votes are due to the LNC-Business list by May 20 2020 at 11:59:59 pm
> Pacific time.
>
> Co-Sponsors:  Bilyeu, Harlos, Hewitt, Mattson, Smith
>
> =============================================
>
>
> Motion: Rescind in its entirety the motion adopted during the May 9, 2020
> LNC
>
> meeting, which called for a convention to begin on May 22, 2020 with
>
> business conducted online.  Instead, in accordance with Bylaw Article 10.1,
>
> the LNC calls an in-person convention to occur during the dates of July
>
> 8-12, 2020 at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida.
>
> =============================================
>
> THRESHOLD REQUIRED:
>
>
> You can keep track of the Secretary's manual tally of votes here:
> https://tinyurl.com/ballot200513-1.  Votes are noted with a link to the
> actual ballot cast for verification. You can find the time that the manual
> tally was last updated at the bottom of the sheet.
>
>
> Please notify me of any discrepancies.
>
> *  In Liberty,*
> * Personal Note:  I have what is commonly known as Asperger's Syndrome
> (part of the autism spectrum).  This can affect inter-personal
> communication skills in both personal and electronic arenas.  If anyone
> found anything offensive or overly off-putting (or some other social faux
> pas) in an actual email, please contact me privately and let me know.  *
>

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